Picking Up the Pieces
by KnightNight7203
Summary: "I won't– I won't ever turn one thousand, will I?" In which Rose and the human Doctor address his many differences from the Time-Lord counterpart, and, most importantly, the fact that he is still the same.


**Well, here's my second story. Sorry it's been a while – I don't recommend taking four AP exams and a college calc final in the same week. :) But I survived, and am still writing, so I consider it a success.**

**Thank you sooo so much to everyone who reviewed my first story! Readers like you keep me writing! Reviews for this are welcome as well! Help me make it better!**

**Okay, enough self-publicizing. Here it is!**

**Standard disclaimers apply. I own nothing but my computer, and even that is conditional.**

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She finds him sitting in the window, his knees curled to his chest like a child, staring into the sky. This particular face is less than a week old, but for once, he looks every one of his nine-hundred and some years.

It's late, past midnight. He doesn't seem to sleep, even with this new half-human form. She sighs behind him and he jumps, flinches, and turns to meet her eyes all in one fluid motion.

"Rose," he mumbles when he realizes who it is. "Hi."

She thinks his expression might break her heart. It's so lost and so tired. That hasn't changed – his ability to affect her emotions completely, without even trying. Or noticing. Or caring.

"What's wrong, Doc– Doctor?"

His hearts – heart, rather – almost stop by the way she stumbles over the name. His name. _His _name.

"Wrong? Nothing's wrong. Nice to see you too, by the way." Rambling is his defense mechanism, after all.

She settles herself behind him on the ledge, inspecting the moon with an almost amusingly interested expression. Then she turns to him, fire in her eyes. She didn't go through all that just to lose him now. Her Doctor wants her to look after this one. So look after him she will.

"Don't pretend. I can tell."

He sighs. "It's nothing."

"'S alright. You can tell me."

She doesn't think he's going to talk about it. _He _never did, after all. But after a moment, he seems to decide it's not worth keeping secrets anymore.

"I feel – I just feel empty, all right? This is – this is all very strange." He feels awkward, bothering her with his problems after all this time. After all the problems he's caused for her. Without _him,_ she'd have led a normal life, with a job and a family by now. Worse still, without him, she'd still be on the TARDIS with the fully-Time Lord Doctor, exploring the universe and saving worlds. She deserves so much better.

She blinks up at him, her eyes bright in the darkness. "Strange how?"

"Things are missing, Rose." He catches her hand, ignores the way she flinches away, places it over his heart. Or rather, where his heart would have been. That side is silent now. "Feel that? Nothing."

She disentangles her fingers from his, wraps her arms around her stomach. "Yeah, but that's you, innit? Normal? I mean–"

He sighs, running his fingers through his already-messy hair. "Three days ago I had two, Rose. Now I have one. That's how it feels for me. Until the battle, I was him. We were the same."

Her fingers find their way back into his, cautious but accepting. He looks at her.

"I guess I didn't think about it like that." She looks slightly guilty.

He only sighs in response.

They sit there like that for a while, not talking, staring at the sky. He misses the sky. It's only been a few days since they arrived, and he's already itching to leave, explore somewhere else, find an adventure or let one find him.

How will he ever last a lifetime?

"You're all quiet, though. That's – that's different, too."

"Didn't think you wanted to hear me talk."

"You know me, Doctor. I always want to hear you talk."

He chuckles, but it dies away in an instant. "I'm not sure I have anything to say anymore. What is there to talk about?"

She bites her lip, tugs at her hair with the hand that isn't clasped tightly in his own.

"You said something earlier. Something interesting." She breathes out, then says it in a rush. "You told me you loved me."

He nods. "I did."

"Did you mean it?"

"I did."

She eyes him cautiously. "There's a but, though, isn't there?"

He doesn't even bother to make a joke. "There is." He avoids her eyes as he adds, "I don't deserve this."

When he doesn't elaborate, she lets go of his hand and slides to sit across from him. "You're blaming yourself."

He shrugs.

"It's not your fault. You can't feel responsible for – for anything, really. It was all him."

"I killed the Daleks. I got us stuck here." _I was created in the first place. My biggest mistake._

"Oh, please," Rose snorts. He looks at her curiously. "He would have blown them up in the end. Of course he would have – it wouldn't be the first time we've gotten rid of swarms of the things. He was just looking for someone else to blame."

A part of him feels better, but he also thinks he should defend _him_ – after all, it's what either of them would have done. They are the same. "It was still genocide. And he should blame me. It was my fault."

She giggles suddenly, and though he's confused – he hadn't thought it was funny – his heart expands slightly at the happy sound. He likes Rose when she's happy. He wishes she had more reasons to smile.

"Only the Doctor could blame himself without actually blaming _himself."_

"Well. That's me." _Him._

"You don't have to look so lonely, you know. I am here. I'm not gonna leave you."

_Like he left us. Like we left each other before._ The words hang unspoken between them.

He sighs again. If his single heart is as heavy as his lungs, she thinks, it's a wonder it hasn't faltered under bearing the stress on it's own.

"It's not that. I – I can't hear her, Rose. The TARDIS. I've always felt her there, at the back of my mind, singing, giving off feelings. And now she's gone."

"I'm here, though." She says it matter-of-factly, but the way she's eyeing him, cautiously, full of anticipation, is anything but.

He smiles gently. "Yes, you are. But not inside my head. Back when – when Gallifrey still existed, I could feel the Time Lords. Inside my mind. The TARDIS kept it from being completely empty. But now . . ."

"Gallifrey." Rose repeats the name slowly, carefully, as if she's worried he'll be upset by her pronouncing it. "Davros mentioned stuff about that. On the Crucible."

"Well. Yeah."

"He said – he said you were responsible."

He's not sure he can take many more confessions in one long, terrible day. But Rose deserves the truth, especially after all this time. "I destroyed Gallifrey. I destroyed my people. He was right."

"But you only did it because it was the right thing to do. What was the alternative? A universe overrun with Daleks?"

"It doesn't change the facts. All those people, lost because of me."

"I'm not trying to make you feel guilty. You shouldn't think about it if you don't have to. But you could have told me anyway."

"But I couldn't."

She sighs. "You could have told me anything about Gallifrey, really. You haven't mentioned it before. And it might have helped." Her eyes meet his and she stares, long and hard.

"To be honest, this is the first time I've thought about it in years. Since I met you. Easier that way. I was – I was a bit of a mess before that, though."

She chuckles softly. "I can imagine."

"I'm not sure you can." He remembers the dark times, not caring whether he lived or died, spending each day trying to find a way to escape the emptiness and each night reliving the chaos and counting the children. His eyes are not watering. He is a Time Lord. Human emotions and hormones have no sway over his superior mind.

"_He_ knew you would be thinking about that again, though? Worrying about what you did? And he still left you?"

Rose's efforts to turn everything back to _him_ were nice, but it was getting exhausting. He wasn't sure whether to attack or defend himself. "He's worrying about it, too, Rose. "

"But he just left us here to pick up the pieces on our own. He's got everybody else. Martha. Sarah Jane. Donna. Jack."

The Doctor decides now would not be a very good time to mention the farewells _he_ was facing in the aftermath. He wanted Rose to feel better, not worse. There would be time to acknowledge _his_ suffering once they dealt with their own issues.

She's smiling reassuringly at him, almost as if she knows he's hiding something. She can certainly tell how upset she is. And he used to be so _good_ at keeping things bottled up inside.

"But we can do it, yeah? We'll make this work." Her voice only cracks a little. That's his Rose. So brave, willing to see anything through to the end.

And suddenly he's struck by how very mature she's become. When he lost her, she was still a girl, showing her emotions easily and making thoughtless promises that she couldn't possibly keep. She's grown up in their time apart, leaving a more practical and hardened woman behind.

That too is his fault, he supposes.

"How old are you, Rose?"

"What?"

"How much time has passed?"

"Oh." She thinks for a moment. "I'm almost twenty-three. It's been about three years here." Her face darkens. "I got old."

He scoffs. "Yeah, twenty three is old. Nine-hundred twenty three, now that's . . ."

"Do you actually know?" she interrupts him. "How old you are?"

He tugs his ear. Had he told her a different number before? It was hard to keep track. "Oh, you know. About. Well. Ish."

"Because it changes every time you tell me. Unless Time Lords measure years differently?"

He chuckles at that. "Nope, same. I am definitely nine hundred-something, though. And I'll be able to tell once I hit my thousands. That'll definitely feel different."

And suddenly, inexplicably, tears fill her eyes and she turns away. And he remembers.

"Oh."

She sniffles. "Yeah. Oh."

"I won't– I won't turn one thousand, will I?"

Her head slowly moves back and forth. "I'm sorry. I'm so sorry." The part of his brain that isn't wrapped up in this new development dimly registers how much she's started to sound like him.

"That's odd." He takes a shaky breath in, forces a smile. "Still, not your fault. Might as well make the most of it, yeah? Travel while we can."

"How long?"

He's caught off guard by how direct the question is. "Until I die?"

"No, you idiot." She smacks him gently, and for a moment he can pretend things are the same. Until he remembers what they're talking about. And why. "Till the TARDIS is ready."

"Oh." His heart is beating rather quickly now. He's not sure if it's supposed to do that, or if it's from some sort of fear or just because she touched him. He hopes that particular reaction doesn't become a permanent thing. It makes it rather difficult to concentrate. "If we do what Donna said . . . Probably a little over a year."

"Oh, okay." She sighs a little, leaning over until her shoulder rests against his. It feels different now that his body temperature is higher than a normal Time Lord, but she's still warmer than he is. He unconsciously shifts closer. He missed her so much. And he is so very cold.

He thinks then, suddenly and entirely unexpectedly, that he might very much like to kiss her. After all, their kiss on Bad Wolf Bay definitely registers in his favorite top ten events in his life. Maybe even the top five.

Maybe the number one.

But as he begins to consider leaning in, she turns her face away, almost as though she read his mind. Either that, or he's a lot more obvious than he thought. He's not really done the whole romance thing in a while, so he's not entirely sure he's any good at it. Giving up rather quickly, he settles for taking her hand again, and she lets him.

Of course she wouldn't want to kiss him. She doesn't even believe he is _him._ He was an idiot if he thought this would be that easy. Kissing Rose Tyler was not going to become a common occurrence any time soon.

Add it to the list of reasons why human-Time Lord metacrises should never occur.

He goes back to staring at the sky, with more than a small part of him wishing he had never been created at all.

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**Let me know what you think! Comments are confidence-boosters!**

**Also, kind of unrelated, does anybody know if there's a specific name for those stories that basically consist of a bunch of independent run-on sentences that show characters' thoughts? I love that style and have a couple ready but don't really know how to describe them other than that . . . I'm still basically new on here and didn't know if they had some sort of title. So yeah . . . educate me if you can! Thanks!**

**Much love,  
****KnightNight7203**


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